While the calendar and contacts are integrated with the usual services and accounts, such as your Google account, BlackBerry’s Tasks and Notes app only synchronises with Microsoft and Novell servers.

This means that to synchronise the task list visible in the Productivity Tab with a cloud service, you will either need a Windows Live Hotmail or Outlook account, or be connected to a Microsoft Exchange or Novell Groupwise server.

You can disable the Productivity Tab, but you can’t uninstall it.

BlackBerry Productivity slide-out tab

Pop-up widgets

Another great feature BlackBerry has added to Android is the pop-up widget.

While the home screen widgets are one of the unique features Android has, many of the widgets that apps provide aren’t used.

Looking at my own usage, I typically arrange my main home screen into folders of apps I want easy access to, with my calendar widget taking up 6 or 9 icon slots. Because they take up so much space, I might only have one more widget on a secondary home screen.

With pop-up widgets, you can access an app’s widget with a swipe up or down, giving you a way to see the latest information from the app without opening it.

This is similar to iPhone’s new peek-and-pop feature linked to 3D Touch.

BlackBerry Android pop-up widgets

Security features: Picture password

BlackBerry has also baked extra security features into Android.

Two that are visible to users are its picture password screen lock, and the BlackBerry DTEK app.

Picture password solves the problem of unlocking your device while being watched.

Instead of a PIN, pattern, or password, picture password lets you choose a number, and set a location for that number on a picture.

When you unlock your phone, you are presented with a randomised grid of numbers. You then find a copy of your number and drag it around the grid until it is over the secret location you selected.

BlackBerry picture password

Security features: DTEK

DTEK is BlackBerry’s way of helping users deal with the insecure app ecosystem on Android.

It lets you see which apps are requesting potentially privacy-violating permissions, like access to your camera, contacts, location, microphone, and text messages.

You can see what an app is doing on your system, and decide whether it is misbehaving.

From DTEK, you can then kill the app, uninstall it, or have DTEK notify you every time the app accesses a sensitive area of your device.

BlackBerry DTEK

On Android, fragmentation, and updates

The PRIV doesn’t run Android 6.0 Marshmallow, the latest version of Google’s mobile OS.

However, BlackBerry has promised that it’s working on an update for the PRIV.

It is also proud of the fact that it has not only kept current with the security patch regime Google has for Android, but had a patch out before Google released it for the Nexus.

A key piece of hardware missing from the PRIV is a fingerprint reader. BlackBerry doesn’t think fingerprints are a particularly-secure authentication mechanism.

The PRIV can also run quite hot, and when it does I noticed a bit of flex and soft creaking from the non-removable back cover.

It didn’t feel like the phone was coming apart, just that the back cover didn’t feel as solid as the rest of the phone.

Early reviewers also complained that BlackBerry’s software, particularly the Hub, was slow.

While I found many issues with Hub, I didn’t find it to be sluggish.

BlackBerry PRIV

Conclusion

In short: if it weren’t for the price, the PRIV would be my next phone.

I can’t help but wonder if BlackBerry had not insisted on developing its own mobile operating system (BlackBerry 10), what might have been.

If BlackBerry had been making Android phones all this time, would hardware keyboards be more prominent today?

Would BBM still be competition with WhatsApp in South Africa?

BlackBerry has said it didn’t feel that Google’s OS could do what it needed from a platform until the release of Android 5.0.

“We really couldn’t do that before then. It wasn’t ready. There were a number of capabilities that would require too much surgery on our part to add the capabilities we needed,” BlackBerry told VentureBeat.

“Lollipop reduced the amount of surgery to a point where we could add our special sauce and let us maintain the product going forward.”

Oh right, the keyboard!

BlackBerry Android software keyboard

The keyboard is awesome – both of them.

BlackBerry has ported its software keyboard from BlackBerry 10 to Android, which features a predictive text system that displays words above characters as you type.

You can then swipe up to send the word to the input field. You can also set the keyboard to predict words in up to 3 languages at once.

For the hardware keyboard, BlackBerry borrowed from the Passport.

While I would have preferred a keyboard more like those we saw on the Bold or the Q10, the keyboard on the PRIV is great – and is touch-sensitive.

You swipe back on it to delete a word, or use it as a trackpad to navigate around text you’re editing. It also has predictive text.

The keyboard is divided into thirds, with a word displayed above each section. You can then swipe up on the hardware keyboard underneath the predicted word to send it to the text field.

Together, this makes for the best typing experience you will find on any smartphone.

Review disclaimer: Devices are typically provided to MyBroadband for two weeks. The views are therefore based on short-term usage. We were given the PRIV model STV100-4 to review.

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